Rex Smith: Truth-telling’s toll and legacy

You never know what story will jump off the newspaper page at you and make you think harder about something going on in the world. In my line of work, I feel obliged to pay attention to every story, you know, but we each have only so much data storage space in our brains, not to mention a limit to how many files we can open in our consciousness at once, so stuff can get shuffled back, with the idea that we’ll get to it when we can.

Which is where the conflict in Syria had rested in my mind until the death last week of Marie Colvin, the New York-born correspondent for the Sunday Times of London, who was killed Wednesday in Homs, along with French photographer Remi Ochlik.

Colvin knew how dangerous it was to remain in Homs, a city that has been under attack by its own government for weeks. “We were told, if they find you, they will kill you,” a colleague said, referring to the Syrian army. So Colvin had prepared to flee, but then decided to stay to do one more piece. Hours before shells rained down on her makeshift media center in what seems to have been a targeted attack, she had accused the army in a CNN broadcast of perpetrating the “complete and utter lie that they are only going after terrorists.”

She added, “The Syrian army is simply shelling a city of cold, starving civilians.”

This is the murderous reality of the government of Bashar al-Assad, a London-trained ophthalmologist who initially seemed bent on reform when he inherited the dictatorship from his father a dozen years ago, but who is poised to be remembered instead as one of the world’s most bloodthirsty tyrants.

An appropriate international response to Assad — an attempt to save innocent lives — is being blocked by the governments of China and Russia. Think about that, please, as you consider the emerging power of China in the world economy and Russia’s claim to have laid aside its Cold War-era foreign policy. There is no legitimate claim of high ground for their shameful protection of a butcher.

Colvin was determined to make the world aware of what has been going on in Homs, Syria’s third-largest city, to “bear witness,” as she said in a 2010 speech.

“Our mission is to report these horrors of war with accuracy and without prejudice,” she said, at that Fleet Street event. “Journalists covering combat shoulder great responsibilities and face difficult choices. Sometimes they pay the ultimate price.”

Yes, sometimes. According to the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists, 902 journalists have died while doing their jobs in the last 20 years; Colvin and Ochlik are the latest.

I did not know Marie Colvin, but some of my old friends did. Reporters who cover war zones tend to be a restless and relentless type who consider personal sacrifice a price they pay for the fulfillment of what they see as a moral obligation to tell the truth to an often oblivious world. Colvin’s previous career sacrifices included an eye (Sri Lanka, 2001) and three marriages.

For a journalist sitting in a comfortable newsroom in America, the work that we do is similar to Marie Colvin’s only in the fundamental goal: to seek the truth and report it fully. It’s somewhat the way I feel when somebody who knows of my love of singing describes me as a musician. I’m really not a musician in the sense that Joshua Bell or B.B. King or Seiji Ozawa are musicians.

In the mid-1980s, I was briefly on assignment in El Salvador during the civil war there. When one day a soldier was shot dead just across a crowded street from me, I was too terrified of the swarm of rifle-bearing troops to even lift a camera to my eye. But that experience is probably among the moments in my career that have built my capacity to accept with some equanimity the rants of politicians, partisans and others. Truth-telling can bring down showers of anger, but none of it here is as perilous as what Marie Colvin confronted daily.

These days, Americans are paying less attention to what goes on outside our borders and more to what’s happening to their pocketbooks. Without reporter witnesses, there would be no hope for people like those who are dodging bombardment even now in Homs.

But Colvin’s mother, interviewed at her home on Long Island, believes there’s an even broader message we may take from her daughter’s death.

“Her legacy is: Be passionate and be involved in what you believe in,” Rosemarie Colvin said. “And do it as thoroughly and honestly and fearlessly as you can.”